How Can We Educate Students on the Web Engineering Discipline via the Web? The NTUA's Approach.

Over the last years the Web has been increasingly used as a platform for supporting the delivery of flexible and interactive hypermedia applications. However, it is admitted that the dominant approach is ad hoc development. Developers should be educated in the use of effective processes, process models, methods, tools and documentation guidelines. In few words, they should be trained on the Web Engineering discipline. The number of courses which deal with this discipline is augmenting. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece offers such a course with a main pedagogical aim to make students well aware of the advantages when following systematic hypermedia development approaches contrary to ad hoc practices. NTUA’s approach was to use open learning methods based on a Web-based instructional system. NTUA team developed the instructional system in a systematic way having challenged itself that such way can lead to pedagogically effective instructional delivery and to learning material fo high quality. The evaluation results showed that the challenge was met. This paper presents the NTUA’s instructional approach about the web engineering discipline and the qualitative evaluation results